Author's Note: Long wait and Lorca is fully-dressed throughout. Honestly, I have nothing to say in my defence.
Chapter 3: This Alien Shore
Lorca took the two ale-filled nano-plastic glasses from the sullen vulcan behind the bar counter. The glasses were brimming with froth, he leaned down to suck the top layer into his mouth before it got a chance to spill all over his fingers. If he had expected the taste to be an improvement over mostly replicated food and drinks, he would be disappointed. The froth tasted bland and papery, peppered with sour alcohol.
He took the glasses back to the table off in a corner, felt the alien gravity of the planet tug on the muscles in his legs, threatening his balance ever so slightly. He felt heavier than he had on the Defiant, still struggling to adapt to Yemuro's environment.
He put the glasses down, then slid into his seat opposite Kodos and angled himself so he could survey the entire room — and especially the entrance.
Kodos had diligently prepared for their cover, as per Lorca's instructions. Lorca's large coat, while it gave him the vague shape of a barrel, allowed him to easily conceal any number of weapons. It made him look larger, too, especially next to Kodos' slighter frame and slightly more elegant, tailored clothed. An off-world businessman and his bodyguard. Most of the focus would settle on Kodos as the apparent leader, allowing Lorca the luxury of observation. It also helped keep anyone from recognising Lorca by his face alone, which unfortunately happened to be fairly well-known. He had pulled the collar of his coat up, helping disguise the line of his jaw and part of his face was hidden behind the medical eyepatch over his right eye. Its built-in computer allowed for minor contextual processing and expanded his field of vision to well behind his shoulder. He could've used combat mods on it but had decided against it. Military-grade augments were likely to attract more attention than they were worth.
Lorca watched Kodos as the other man calmly took a sip from the ale. He showed no sign that the taste bothered him.
"I'm sorry," Lorca said after a moment, sweeping his gaze over his companion. "I should've asked if you were up to it."
Kodos looked back at him evenly. Not for the first time, Lorca realised how strange it was to be sitting here with this man of all possible people and have any kind of conversation, much less a polite one.
After a moment, Kodos said, "You are always very polite. There's no issue, I knew what I did when I joined your crew."
Culber had accused him of excessive politeness at least twice before. Terrans did their level best to avoid admitting a mistake, they never apologised and meant it, the best they seemed capable of was grovelling supplication if they suspected they really had fucked up badly.
Kodos took another sip, then pulled a PADD from the travelling bag and put it at the table between them, ready for the next step while Lorca was still trying to find his balance from the last. The memories of Tarsus — the real Tarsus, the one at home — was at the tip of his tongue, persistent against his attempt to wash it away with the ale.
At home, he had never actually met Kodos, there had never been a moment when he needed to think of him anything other than a target he had to reach, prey he had to catch, or, as time passed, a nightmare haunting his past. Was this calmly methodical man, himself polite towards Lorca and what had to seem like irrational behaviour, a functional measure of that other one.
His ale was nearly half-empty on his darkening musings. Because looking back at that time, at his hunt for Kodos and the way he had to hold on to his very principles by his fingertips. It had taken years to come to terms with the fact that he had wished very much for Kodos to resist and fight back, give him a chance to kill him. But there was another truth hiding inside it, only relevant now that he was looking at the realisation from the vantage point of years past and the context of a very different universe. Sometimes, these days, he caught himself wondering why he would have needed a reason to kill Kodos other than what he had already done.
"Captain?" Kodos started, looked at Lorca expectantly. "Our next step should be to make contact with the dealer."
Lorca looked past Kodos at the people milling about the pub. A newsfeed was projected along a stretch of the wall above the bar.
"We have time, Mr Karidian," he said, using Kodos' assumed name. "Let's take in the atmosphere first, get a sense of the place. I haven't been planet-side in a while."
Indeed, he hadn't been down on a planet since they'd left Tarsus and that planet had very little in common with Yemuro. Lorca had expected an industrial hub like this to be a cesspool of misery, aliens and humans alike treated like livestock and work-slaves, some sort of instant punishment system in place to respond to all and any deviant behaviour.
After a while, Lorca said, "I didn't expect Yemuro to be like this."
Something stilled in Kodos' face as he realised Lorca had thrown him an opening line, though Kodos was still confused as to what to with it. So, to avoid an answer, Kodos took a glance around the room, looking for whatever specifics had prompted Lorca's words.
Eventually, Kodos settled on, "What did you expect?"
"Well, stricter segregation between the races."
"There is some of that," Kodos said. "Most aliens aren't completely free to move around."
"No one can go absolutely everywhere they want," Lorca said and took a sip off his ale as he considered how willing he was to let it apply to him. Again, Kodos seemed uncertain what to make of the remark. If he was honest with himself, it was a little amusing how confused Kodos was by Lorca's attempt to connect with him. Clearly, he hadn't expected Lorca to ever let go of his animosity towards him.
Lorca let himself be momentarily distracted when the newsfeed changed. However, it didn't report on the Defiant as Lorca had feared. The incident was either considered not important enough or — which was far more likely — the propaganda machinery controlling the news didn't think it was a good idea to report on an unknown, cloaked vessel appearing in orbit only to vanish again. At least it meant the Defiant had made her escape successfully, otherwise, there would have been some bragging.
"In my universe," Lorca started again. "We don't actually know what a romulan looks like."
He glanced back at the bar and studied the vulcan who'd served him earlier, wondering if maybe it had been a romulan, after all. That piece of information had briefly sucked the breath from him when he'd read it. Not only had the Terran Empire made contact with the romulans, they were also engaged in a long, protracted war of conquest, currently occupying roughly a quarter of what used to be space firmly in romulan hands. At home, people hadn't even known what a romulan looked like, much less had an inkling of their vulcan ancestry. The archives on the Defiant didn't have much information on the details of that split. Like all conquering nations, the terrans saw little reason to record or respect the cultures they subjugated. Still, the mere fact that the romulans were still holding their own was enough to pique the interest of military engineers as well as scientists and scholars, providing more than enough material to keep Lorca up for hours, devouring every morsel.
"We went to war with them, then made peace with them, all without ever seeing one," Lorca said. No wonder, too, their ability to pass off as vulcan would have made infiltrating their enemies a breeze. No one would ever see it coming. But then, the romulans had inadvertently kick-started what would become the Federation, whatever meddling they had done behind the scenes, it hadn't paid off the way they had hoped.
Unlike Tarsus, Yemuro had a substantial alien population. Lorca could identify at least half a dozen alien species interacting freely with each other, seemingly without any of their own ancestral hatreds. Having all been conquered by the terrans probably gave them all the commonality they needed. Nothing united better than a common enemy, Lorca thought. He took a sip of the ale, hoped the taste would burn down his throat and distract him, but it merely completed the bitterness.
"Captain, ten days isn't…" Kodos said.
"Mr Basora," Lorca corrected him. "I'm just your bodyguard, remember?"
A database search on both names had turned up nothing suspicious or unique. This universe's Jorge Basora had served on the Buran briefly and been killed in action long before Lorca's treachery had been known, perhaps long before he himself had known he wanted to be emperor.
Kodos looked slightly displeased with the reprimand but chose not to say anything. "Very well, I think ten days isn't such a long time. We shouldn't waste it."
"We should get settled in," Lorca said with as much patience as he could muster. Just because he was playing the subordinate didn't mean he was going to let Kodos take over wholesale. "If I have to fight, I want to know my surroundings."
Kodos frowned and cast a quick, assessing gaze around the pub, a look which encompassed the entirely planet and their situation. He was too polite to point out that, if Lorca had to fight, he would go down within minutes. Their only protection was anonymity.
After another moment of thought, Kodos loaded up a map of the immediate area onto the PADD between them.
"In that case, I suggest we find a place to stay," he said. "There is a hotel not far from here, it's fully automated, should I book rooms?"
"Wouldn't people be easier to game than a computer?"
He thought of the immediate alarm his DNA had raised by any actual scan of him.
"Maybe," Kodos conceded with the looks of a man who disagreed and didn't want to argue. "But I did my research, the hotel is located in a high-crime area, likely hosting criminals regularly, yet there's no indication any alarm has been raised from there in the past three years. I suspect either their scanners are non-functional or their network connections have been allowed to erode. Possibly both."
"Well," Lorca said. "Book the rooms then."
Moreau had provided contact details for a handful of people who dealt in dilithium crystals. As an essential component for warp engines, the empire liked to keep trade with them regulated to clamp down on the warp capabilities of enemies and rebels as well as independent starship captains, who it tended to label pirates regardless of their actual vocation. Not few of them, Lorca thought, would have been forced into piracy by that same draconian regulation. Dealing in dilithium, especially warp-grade, was a dangerous business and despite Moreau's information, Lorca wasn't sure the trade would go through without issue. He had no one to vouch for him, after all, and the face of a man most people, human and alien, either at least distrusted or outright hated.
"Maybe you're right," Lorca said and watched the surprise light up Kodos' face. "Let's not waste time."
#
Barely an hour later, Lorca leant against the narrow slit of a window in his hotel room. Kodos had used the hotel's automated check-in terminal for both of them, minimising the risk of Lorca getting anywhere too close to a scanner and raising hell this early in the game. Their rooms had a connecting door of plastic so thin it wasn't entirely opaque, so Lorca could see the glow from the holo-projection in front of Kodos, even if he couldn't make out any details. Though, for the moment the city street below held all his attention with its over-crowded bustling. Sometimes, a terran in uniform would push through them, leaving an open gap behind, a shark breaking through water, but for the short time Lorca was watching, he had to witness no scenes of needless violence or abuse. Perhaps this society had already worked through the necessity for either, subduing their enemies to the point where they fell from desperation into mere hopeless apathy.
The room's air filtration was bad, scratching in his throat as he took a deeper breath and turned away from the window and almost missed a step, misjudging his own body weight. It would be something to watch out for, though he'd very much prefer if he didn't get himself into a situation when it mattered. He knew he was mostly just posturing with his weapons and glaringly displayed attitude. On Tarsus, he'd had advantages to help bring him out on top, but here he only had one non-combatant at his side and no quick exit strategy. He'd have to watch his step in more than one way.
They weren't up high enough to give him much of a view of the skyline, but somewhere out there, the way home waited for him to take the first step. All he had to do now was reach out, he could almost always feel it. He knew he should pace himself. Take this one slowly, one carefully measured decision at a time.
He watched himself as he bunched his fist, chased the sensation of it down his arm and into his shoulder, trying to figure out what to do with the tension. Fuck that. Timidness never worked in this universe that much he knew for certain.
He walked through the connecting door to stand in front of Kodos' table, looking down at the man until Kodos looked up expectantly.
"Can I go into the vulcan quarter or are they closed at night?"
"Not to humans," Kodos said. "Or aliens who have legitimate business." He paused. "Or aliens without legitimate business but alternative means."
Lorca nodded, just what he expected — and hoped — and he stepped away to the cluster of his weapons and the coat to methodically put everything on.
"I'm going out," he said, realising only after he'd said it how having to communicate his intentions so was both necessary and irritating. And it he hadn't exactly given Kodos much information to work with.
As he made his way down to the street and into the only slightly thinning evening crowd, Lorca thought he should have been honest with Kodos. Honest all the way through to the other side, where his memories of the Tarsus IV massacre lay buried. He'd need to remedy it soon.
The crowds didn't quite part for him the way they would for a uniformed terran, but they shifted enough to allow him passage without slowing him down much. After a little while, Lorca realised he was following the same pattern, watching out for people in uniform and making sure he wasn't directly in their path. And there were a lot of those, not just walking — patrolling — but also manning guard posts and street corners, close enough they could always see each other. The Terran Empire was a military dictatorship, after all, and here was the presence to prove it, in case Lorca had had any doubts. No one spared him much attention, which was good enough for him.
The scrubbing held its promise, however. The contextual display in his eyepatch warned him of the location of DNA sniffers, allowing him to avoid them if he wanted though he quickly learned that wasn't necessary. When the motion of the crowd pushed him close to one, nothing happened, either and when he arrived at the gate to the vulcan quarter, he walked through right next to one without the device giving any indication he bothered it at all.
The vulcan quarter was a container town, ugly and uniform, with not even a hint of typical vulcan architecture or sense of aesthetics. Stacks of dull, greyed plastics formed honeycombs of towers, allowing for narrow passageways between each, barely enough space for two people next to each other, except for the broad main-axis cutting through the area which would allow scooters or chariots to pass easily.
The deeper he went into the vulcan quarter, the fewer non-vulcans were about. People here walked with measured paces, a certain type of solemnity he had come to associate with vulcans, though in this context, he couldn't help but think of their posture as apathetic, a broken people shuffling around in their ghetto. Terran guard posts were still in place but seemed to be often automated. Lorca saw patrols only on the main thoroughfares.
He switched the display in his eyepatch and let the display direct him to Sennai's allotted housing. As he made his way into the neatly ordered, but still confusing maze of towers, the lights began to shift. From natural sunlight filtered through the smog-filled air to the brightness of artificial lights, dimmed to a terran's comfort level. Even he breathed just a little easier when the thin cover of darkness draped itself over him, primordial instincts giving him a false sense of security.
They were close to the planet's equator, making the transition pass quickly and by the time Lorca had found the right tower, no remnant sunlight reached him anymore. Each tower had a single vacuum lift and a rickety staircase allowing access to the upper floors.
Sennai's housing unit was located on the 49th floor. Musing on his fitness level, Lorca pushed his way into the lift alongside several vulcans, an andorian and two terrans. The lift crawled upwards, each needlessly elongated minute of its travel time grating on Lorca's composure. No one spoke and no one looked at each other in their shared, confined space, except for the two terrans who joked with each other. According to their conversation, they were maintenance workers, charged with fixing devices on the roof of the structure. One of the terrans made brief eye contact with Lorca and leered, assuming some disreputable reason for Lorca's presence in the building, but he didn't say anything.
Only in the upper floors did the passenger count begin to dwindle and Lorca used the chance to shuffle his way to the side of the lift cabin, putting his back to a wall finally, letting him relax slightly for the rest of the way. By the time the 49th floor came, Lorca had no problem getting to the door. He stepped out into a clean, but clearly old and worn hallway.
Lorca followed the directions in his eyepatch towards the outer edge, where Sennai's unit was located. It seemed, as a highly educated worker, she had been given the privilege of having actual outside windows, for whatever that actually was worth.
As he was getting closer, Lorca spotted a vulcan ahead of him, seemingly taking the same turns he did. She was tall, almost his own height, and slim, dressed in a jumpsuit. Her long, curly hair was tied back at the neck, dark, but heavily shot through with silver. Lorca picked up the pace slightly, comparing the vulcan ahead of him to Sennai's only picture. Seemed like fortune was on his side for once.
Sennai didn't seem to notice his stalking her, or else decided to ignore it until he made his intentions clear. It would make sense for an alien to avoid confronting any terran without a good reason and backup, even if that terran was notably not a member of the military. Or, for that matter, self-identifying as terran.
Sennai stopped at her door and unlocked it by swiping a metallic bracelet over the sensor. Lorca broke into a run as the door slid open. In the short time it took for him to collide with her, he caught himself thinking he was doing this all wrong.
Finally alerted to him, Sennai turned towards him but had no time to muster any defence.
Lorca snatched her by her shoulders and pushed her through the door and into her home. The door closed behind him and the lights inside went on automatically. Unlike the inhospitable public lighting, Sennai's housing was lit by soft, golden light, reminiscent of vulcan's desert sun at sunset.
By the time the door had closed, Sennai had gathered her wits, twisted free of his loose grip and swung around. The padding on his coat blocked her attempt at a neck pinch. Realising it wasn't working, she punched her other hand at his face. He blocked, felt the impact on his arm like a metal bar and Sennai didn't let up.
The fight was short and could have been shorter if Lorca had wanted to truly harm his opponent. Sennai had had been trained in martial arts, but she hadn't been in a fight in a long while, rendering her technique slow and sloppy with not nearly enough precision behind it to incapacitate him.
"Stop," he hissed, caught her wrist as she tried a blow, held fast and threw her away from him to gain a little room for them both. "I only want to talk!"
She drew back from him, eyeing him warily, arms still raised defensively.
"You attacked me in my home," she countered. She drew back another step, then slightly to the side. Even as she spoke, quite calmly, she lunged for a dresser next to her, retrieving a phaser.
Lorca had seen the manoeuvre coming and jumped her, catching her wrist and smashing into to the top of the dresser. He locked his leg with hers and toppled her, winding the phaser from her, he stashed in his belt for now and retreated back towards the door, letting her regain her feet.
"I don't want a public spectacle," he said, strained calm as his breathing evened out. "Just listen for five minutes."
Her frown was intense, schooled vulcan features betraying no emotions, but the clear calculation of her next move, her chances if she attacked him, her best guesses as to his presence. He hadn't given her enough material to make any kind of logical decision, except for what she was doing: waiting and staying alert.
"I know that was bad form, I'm sorry," he said, fighting down the rush of adrenaline to appear calmer than he really was. This vulcan was not only his best shot at going home, she was his only shot. And he was doing his level best to waste it.
"I need your help," he said sincerely. "And I'm desperate."
Predictably, the vulcan's face gave nothing away.
"Five minutes," she reminded him sternly. "Security response is slow, but you have no right to be here against my will and there are ways to have you removed."
He wasn't convinced her threat had much to back it up, but he wasn't going to call her bluff when he needed her goodwill. He nodded his acceptance of her terms and was glad he was talking to a vulcan and the luxury of simply stating what he needed outright.
"You used to work with an astromycologist called Straal," he said, making it very much not a question. "You helped develop a displacement-activated spore hub drive. You need to build me one."
Sennai arched an eyebrow in a subtle show of confusion. "You got the wrong person," she said. "I don't know what you're talking about. You should leave."
"Are you going to waste my five minutes on playing dumb?" Lorca said, swallowing down his anger before it had a chance to manifest.
"What you are talking about," she said. "It sounds highly classified. Even if I were allowed to know anything about such a subject, admitting to and talking about it would be a death sentence."
"I'm not testing your loyalty to the Empire here," he said. He took a step to the side and leaned his shoulder into the wall, suddenly needing the support. He shook his head. "I'm so sorry, I'm doing this backwards. You've got no reason to trust me and every reason to distrust me. Look, I'm going to tell you the whole story, but I'll need more than five minutes."
Her gaze tracked over him, assessing him. Her posture didn't change and there was still tense caution lingering in her. He had no doubts she would have long since attacked him again if she thought she stood a chance.
"There are better ways to prove your honesty to me," she said.
He instantly knew what she was getting at. "No," he said, shuddering inwardly at the prospect of it. The vulcans of this universe had learned to weaponise their telepathic abilities. She could easily shred his mind to pieces if she wanted to, tear his thoughts inside out and leave him broken on her floor for security to clean him up once they actually got around to it.
"Not yet," he said. "Distrust goes both ways."
She took a moment longer to answer, making him suspect her offer really had been meant as an attack, not a genuine desire to know his motives.
"Very well," she said. "Talk."
They remained standing in her hallway, uncomfortable as if the fight hadn't concluded only paused, her phaser still in his possession. She didn't move a muscle while he talked, didn't relax, didn't even cock an eyebrow to give him even a hint of her thoughts.
Lorca, talking, felt like he was leaning a dent into her wall, gaze skittering around the room, looking for something else to hold on to. He didn't care at that moment whether it made him look pathetic as long as she understood he was telling her the truth, mostly unabridged, because every fibre of his being needed her to believe him and commit to his cause no matter how disastrous it would make her future.
The computer had snitched on Ferasini and revealed her location to be in the mess hall so Culber made his way there, soaking in the atmosphere on the ship on the way. So far, the small ripples created by Lorca's absence were barely noticeable. There had been a slight increase in emergency response requests, all of which due to an argument becoming physical — not that anyone admitted to it, usually people had had a freak accident, keeping their mouth shut towards a superior, like any crewmen with good sense. People understood quickly that Tyler was, at his heart, a terran-trained officer with a leadership style to match. Tyler tolerated violence much better than Lorca but was less likely to accept even the hint of insubordination and the crew behaved accordingly.
At the very least, it was interesting to observe how quickly the effect Lorca had had on his crew began to fade. Interesting, for sure, but also disquieting on a whole different level.
As if to compound his musings, Culber walked right into an altercation in the mess hall. A tangle of five people was at it, three of them in security uniforms, apparently trying to break it up while enjoying getting the chance to get an additional punch in.
The few people who were in the mess hall at the time had craned their necks to watch, keeping a safe distance away from the scuffle and otherwise enjoying the spectacle.
The security officers finally pulled the two crewmen apart and slapped cuffs on their wrists to deter them from trying to do anything else. Now that they were holding still, Culber had the chance to recognise Lieutenant Zhang as one of them, a visibly broken nose spilling a constant flow of blood down his face. The female lieutenant, Rubau, had a split eyebrow and lip. The security officer in charge snapped at the two of them, telling they get put in isolation until they calmed down. Neither of them asked for medical assistance, too busy glaring at each other to do so. They were marched past Culber and out the door.
A cleaning bot scurried from its home in the wall and began cleaning up the spilt blood and spittle from their fight. The spectacle over, the audience returned to what they had been doing before.
Culber finally spotted Ferasini at a table to the back of the room, seated so she could observe the entirety of the mess hall and herself remain undisturbed. Not that anyone would have dared bother her anyway. On Tarsus, people had treated Ferasini with wary respect, rarely approaching her uninvited, merely admiring her from afar and hoping she would deign to notice them. She had commanded that respect merely by merit of her personality and ability. Here, among military-trained terran personnel, her status was unspoken, but untouchable, her expertise and knowledge mostly worthless. The crew perceived her as belonging to Lorca, the Captain's Woman. Ferasini probably hated it but didn't show it openly. It also was unlikely to truly scratch her confidence and she knew how to play her cards as they were dealt to her. Besides, at least Culber knew that her and Lorca's relationship was far more complicated than that, their power imbalance was tidal, leaving neither of them in control for very long.
She had a bowl of nuts in front of her, a large cup of steaming hot chocolate and a PADD. She was idly nibbling on a nut, watching the cleaning bot do its duty, only acknowledging Culber with a flick of her gaze over him, then back to the scene. She wasn't the type who would pick this sort of place to work, needing the background noise and influx of minor distractions to help her concentrate. It was far more likely she was here to observe, soak in the atmosphere the same way Culber had done. It was amusing to think they were still on the same page in many ways, no matter what else had changed.
"Lieutenant Zhang and Lieutenant Rubau fought over Lorca," she said as Culber sat down opposite her. She shuffled a little to the side along the bench so he didn't block her view completely.
"And he isn't even here," Culber said.
She finished her nut and looked at Culber with a slow frown. "You understand that that's the problem, right?"
"It's been barely a day," Culber said. "They are smarter than that. The captain comes back and they act like that, he'll be terrifying."
Ferasini snorted, unimpressed by his assessment.
"They know something big is happening," Ferasini said, picked up her cup, but pointed one finger past Culber. "Zhang was meeting Alibali."
Culber looked around and spotted Alibali by the replicators. He had seen her before, holding a tray in hand and standing back, looking like she was waiting for the fight to end, so she could walk to a table without the tray getting knocked out of her hand. Now, turning he was just in time to see her put the tray down and leave the mess hall.
"Budding romance or platonic friendship," Culber said with a lopsided grin. "Either way, cute."
"No, risky," Ferasini said. "Because Alibali's pillow talk can ruin us all."
Culber looked back at her, studying her face. The red line across it and the dry, flaky skin framing it. He remembered why he had originally sought her out. "You should let me treat your face."
At least now he had her full attention, even if it was impatience mixed with anger. "I don't care, it's not important."
Culber sighed, gave her benevolent smile and said, "I could get you to do it with one sentence, you know."
She arched a doubtful eyebrow at him. Some movement behind him momentarily tracked her gaze over his shoulder, then back. Her mood was dark and frosty.
"It's just the beginning," she said, not taking the bait he had thrown her. He thought of making her swallow it anyway, but decided to hear her out first.
"The beginning of what?" he asked.
"Lorca is leaving us behind," she said, pulled one corner of her mouth into a bitter little smirk. "He's leaving us again, after a fashion, even if they aren't the same captains. It feels the same to them, I think."
"Hmm," Culber made, stapled his fingers and settled his chin into them. "What do you know about what the Captain's doing on Yemuro?"
"He's looking for a way home."
"That's hardly a secret," Culber pointed out, even if the nagging memory of Moreau's message called him a liar at the back of his head. "We've been jumping at every whisper for months."
"He's found a way," Ferasini said. "And he's trying to keep it from the crew because it'd tear us apart. You should have a plan B ready for when this ship sinks."
"Why should I?" Culber chuckled. "Do you?"
Ferasini tilted her had back, looking down at Culber along her nose, all arrogant confidence and scornful exasperation. She raised her voice just a little. "He's not going to take anyone with him. He'll leave us here, leaderless and unprotected. The Empire will hunt us relentlessly. Tyler cannot hold this crew together and he cannot keep us safe, either."
She frowned at him as he continued not to react. "You should be bothered," she added.
Culber wagged his head from side to side. "Well, I think it's a bit early to overreact. Switching universes is a difficult trick to pull off. Who knows if it'll ever work."
"The rumour of treason can be just as devastating as treason itself."
"Oh fuck," he chuckled. "Did you quote that from a Starfleet manual? Without any irony? Seriously?"
She shrugged, looked around the room, then back at him. "But it's true. Either we're being betrayed by our own captain, or it just looks like we are. What would you do? Err on the side of caution, I should think."
"So what's your plan B?" he asked. "Betray us first?"
She picked up another nut, smiled a little as if contemplating it. "I have no such plans, but someone does, I bet. Just wait and see."
In the gloom of the ready room, Tyler was waiting patiently as the silence stretched on, lingering in the corners. In front of him, both Zhang and Rubau had stopped bleeding while their bruises were beginning to show, their limbs would be feeling the weight of them by now, the sore weakness eating away at their resolve. Both lieutenants kept their gazes fixed straight ahead, unflinching and showing no signs at their increasing level of discomfort.
What would Lorca do? Tyler asked himself.
Ever since Lorca had left, the number of altercations had spiked, as if that one man's single presence had been enough to subdue his entire crew. Lorca didn't tolerate violence, he had backed that statement time and again and channeled his crew's natural aggression into whoever happened to be his target. Tyler suspected some people thought they could advance themselves in Lorca's absence without suffering immediate repercussions and some of them would doubtless be stupid enough to think Lorca would let it stand upon his return.
Finally, Tyler said, "Well, nothing to say?"
Whatever disagreement they'd had in the mess hall, it didn't stop them from answering with a unified, "No sir!"
"That's the kind of teamwork I expect on the ship," Tyler remarked with caustic humour.
Zhang briefly shifted his gaze at Tyler, but was careful not to make accidental eye-contact and put himself on the spot.
"I think you two would benefit from some more experience in that department," Tyler said, made a sharp gesture at the security officers by the door.
"Put them both in the same cell, let's give them a chance to work their issues out. Some alone time will do you both good. Enjoy your leisure, it'll be double shifts after that."
As they were led away, Tyler wondered what the two of them would do with his punishment. They could use the chance to kill each other in that cell, which he knew he should hope they wouldn't. Perhaps they'd talk or fuck it out. He didn't much care as long as they pulled their weight again once they were out of the cell.
Belatedly, Tyler realised Lorca might have offered them medical assistance and once they inevitably refused, he would have forced it on them. A would be a clever trick, maintaining the image of the leader he was while making absolutely sure they understood who was making the decisions. The chance for it was done and Tyler decided it wouldn't hurt — wouldn't hurt him, anyway — if he maintained his own style of command.
After some more thought, Tyler sighed and pulled up the latest report from engineering. They had been able to achieve warp speed of up to three for shorter durations, enough to get themselves out of dodge and hide for further repairs. Bell never tired of assuring him they would be able to pick up Lorca in the ten days, regardless of where he went.
It wasn't good enough. They needed to be able to swoop back down over Yemuro and pick him up directly. That's what Tyler wanted from Bell and her team.
He put the report aside, swiped his thumb over his console and extended an invitation to Kriger to share lunch with him by shift's end.
End of Chapter 3
Reference: "This Alien Shore" is a book by C. S. Friedman, who I used to love, but have somehow grown out of.